Every U.S. president comes into office with big dreams, only to be bludgeoned by the realities of international politics.
At the end of the day, presidents are forced to prioritize goals, restrain ambitions and seek a framework that helps them organize their foreign policy. George W. Bush, for instance, stuck with his global war on terrorism mindset. Barack Obama’s approach was crafted in part to keep the United States from repeating the mistakes of the Bush years. Donald Trump’s “America First” weighed heavily on transactional dealings.
President Joe Biden’s organizing principle could best be summarized as defending the so-called rules-based international order, or the global order that the U.S. built after its victory in World War II. Biden and senior advisers such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeat the phrase constantly in public speeches, press briefings and official government documents. As the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy articulates, “We will partner with any nation that shares our basic belief that the rules-based order must remain the foundation for global peace and prosperity.”
U.S. officials as well as their colleagues in Europe seem to genuinely believe what they’re preaching. Most of the rest of the world, however, tends to view the scripture as bunk — a collection of rules and norms that are designed to be universal but in reality are highly selective depending on whether or not you’re an ally with the West. Countries in the so-called Global South, the vast swaths of Asia, the Middle East Africa and Latin America that make up most of the world’s population, hear the term “rules-based order” and react with a mix of eye-rolls and resignation.
For good reason. In truth, the very rules the U.S. claims to safeguard — respect for international law; the inviolability of borders; the sanctity of state sovereignty; accountability for violators — is an imaginary fairy-tale we tell ourselves before going to bed at night.
The Global South has felt this way for quite a long time. But the ongoing war in Gaza, which local officials say has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, turned much of the enclave into a wasteland and displaced more than 80% of its 2.3 million people, is proof positive that the West in general and the U.S. in particular is highly selective in enforcing the very rules it claims to protect.
It’s difficult to put into words just how medieval the situation in Gaza has become. The seaside Palestinian territory wasn’t a great place to live even on a good day — in 2018, five years before the latest war between Israel and Hamas erupted, U.N. officials assessed that Gaza was “unliveable.” Yet today, the word “unliveable” sounds tame. Gaza’s north, once the most populated area of the enclave, has been destroyed. The hospital system, or what’s left of it, is barely keeping the lights on. The U.N. estimates that a quarter of the population is close to famine.
The humanitarian calamity in Gaza has gotten so bad that President Biden authorized airdrops of food to the people there, a sign if there ever was one that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is largely brushing aside Biden’s pleas for more crossing points and faster aid convoys. The fact that Biden had to resort to airdrops, an extremely expensive and inefficient way of getting humanitarian supplies to civilians on the ground, exposes just how ineffective U.S. policy has become.
This obviously matters for the men, women and children inside Gaza who are forced to deal with extreme hardship and have no option to escape. But it matters to America’s prestige and reputation as well. Much of the world is aghast at the conflict there and equally confounded by Washington’s refusal to use whatever military, political and economic leverage it has over Israel to restrain its partner’s conduct. Particularly when doing so would help solidify the universal rights and prerogatives U.S. leaders are ostensibly interested in promoting.
There’s no use sugar-coating it: on Gaza, the U.S. is increasingly isolated. On February 20, the U.S. delegation at the U.N. Security council vetoed a draft resolution that demanded an immediate cease-fire. Washington did the same thing in December. The U.S. explanation at the time was that any Security Council action would jeopardize the truce negotiations between Israeli and Hamas, which remain ongoing to this very day. Most of the Security Council has scoffed at that justification, pointing out that the draft resolutions supports U.S. attempts to stop the war, get hostages out and humanitarian assistance in.
In case the U.S. had any delusions about just how tenuous its position was, Blinken got an earful from his colleagues during last month’s G20 foreign ministers meeting in Brazil. Even Australia, a U.S. treaty ally, felt the need to distance itself from U.S. policy, warning Israel not to go through with an impending military offensive in Rafah, where more than one million Palestinians are currently displaced. While South Africa’s representative didn’t blame the U.S. specifically, she didn’t have to; the world’s big powers, she said, have all but given Israel blanket immunity.
For many, the war in Gaza and America’s response to it shows that the international system is no longer functioning as it should. “The rules-based order that has governed international affairs since the end of World War II is on its way out, and there may be no turning back,” former U.N. Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine.
But if we’re being completely honest, there was no rules-based order to begin with. Most of the world understands this, even if U.S. policymakers delude themselves.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.